...two adults, two kids, and all their stuff wandering the world. (Plus two in college.)

Monday, April 4, 2016

Spring Break, and the Living is Easy

Finally, after 3 1/2 years in Jordan, I went to Wadi Rum for an overnight. Jonathon has slept under the stars there on a class trip (and oh, the stars!), Nicholas has hiked through it, Becca did a Tropical Desert climbing trip through, Ian has skydived over it, but finally it was my turn (with all of them) to enjoy it.

We highly recommend Wadi Rum Green Desert Camp for a simple overnight. We were met at the Wadi Rum Visitors' Center by the owner, Nadjah, and then followed Suleiman (with 2 of our kids) in the truck to the camp about 10-15 minutes into the desert. The camp is small with 5 small cabins and 2 family cabins. They are called tents but they're more like soft-sided cabins, really. The beds are cots with foam mattresses and head rests though the covers were soft. While I had no intention of using the blanket folded at the end of the bed it was so cold at night that we slept fully-clothed and I was glad I also brought blankets from home for each of us. The wind whipped through steadily, the lights needed to be screwed in to turn on, you get the idea.

They have a bathroom with running water and flushing toilets. For the truly brave, there is a shower stall. No lights actually in the stalls and the doors are solid and block out 98% of the "hall" light, so visits at any time of day or night are interesting. At one point during dinner Nicholas commented that he'd knocked off a scorpion from his leg which caused a minor rush to find it by our hosts, and it was actually something akin to a Middle Eastern earwig. Our host encouraged us by saying that all the mats had been shaken out that day, so no scorpions. I wonder if they shake out the bathrooms to be as certain there?

Wadi Rum is spectacular. The kids wanted to go out on 4X4s but they are forbidden inside the preserved area. Instead we enjoyed a ride in the back of the truck.

Yes, we're all in the photo, look hard!

So yeah. Wadi Rum, rockin'. See what I did there?

We had a couple nights at the Moevenpick in Tala Bay, Aqaba to wash off the Wadi Rum dust. In December of 2012 we stayed at this hotel and haven't been back since. The severe drop in tourism is evident everywhere in Jordan, yet this was the first time we really felt it. The Moevenpick name, like so many others, suggests a certain level of care.

Unfortunately...

We'd asked for early check-in since we were arriving from Wadi Rum. Though we arrived at 11 a.m. our first room was ready at 1:30 p.m.

Our second room was ready at 4:30 p.m., but only after getting a manager involved. The first person I asked said it was still with house-keeping.

Though there were people with lifeguard shirts on, every lifeguard chair by pool and beach was empty.

The towels were all frayed. Minor, but back to the name.

Every pool was missing a large number of tiles, Nicholas got cut. Some tiles were found on the beach.

The beach wasn't cleaned up as often as it should. As we were downstream from the public beaches, the off-beach SCUBA area had plastic bags and other garbage floating all through it.

No pork products at the buffet. Seemingly minor, but if you lived here you'd get it.

The SCUBA reservation that Ian made in February through the hotel website never made it to the SCUBA shop.

Neither did the sunset boat ride.

But a snorkeling trip we didn't reserve was booked for us. Figure that one out.

The gear at the SCUBA shop was more than a little worn. Some pieces look like they'd been chewed on by sharks. The boots were more hole than boot.

And worst of all, the bread rolls were hard and the muesli, the one thing Ian was really excited about, wasn't as good as he remembered.

But at the end of the day, the kids had fun. They did SCUBA. They did The Molecule (shown above). They went jet skiing. They swam in the pools. They skipped rocks into the Red Sea. The Molecule left them with rub rashes from flinging off left and right as the motorboat whipped them around. Everyone came home with some level of sunburn. Fun times.

The drive there and back was easy. Portions of the road were really bad, portions of the road were really good. There were only a few idiot truck drivers. What 18-wheeler decides to pass another one while going uphill? Oh, there are plenty. Drives are our time to listen to family favorites - Jonathan Coulton ("Still Alive" is one of the best songs out there), the Hamilton soundtrack (a new one for us), Bare Naked Ladies, and They Might Be Giants, of course. The DS games come out for road trips, and Becca's laptop showed The Hunger Games and Harry Potter. Whether we're flying or driving, four hours is barely a blip.

So we've done the family thing. Now we're back home and some kids are doing Spring Break things the rest of the week and others are traveling out of Jordan. I'll be at CPR class tomorrow. It's just how we roll.

The GlobeHoppers

For those wondering, Germany is 6 hours ahead of EDT.

We're a Foreign Service family currently posted to Frankfurt, Germany after having spent 2 years in Manila, Philippines, 1 year in Lome', Togo (no, not Tonga), 3 years in Chennai, India, 3 years in Virginia, and 4 years in Amman, Jordan. We'll spend 3 years in Germany to graduate the boys from high school, and our next post is TBD 2019!

I am a former Army brat (lived in Belgium, Zaire, Algeria, Niger, visited too many places to list), now Foreign Service spouse. I tag along where ever Ian takes us and try to keep the family sane. Between 1996 when we got married and 2003 when we moved to Manila we lived in Virginia, Maryland, Georgia, and Florida, and visited several other states.

Rebecca traveled to Oman with chorus (2013), Ethiopia with Week Without Walls (WWW) 2014, Qatar with swimming (2014) and volleyball (2015), and Kuwait with basketball (2016).

Rebecca and Nicholas traveled through Vietnam on WWW 2015 and Thailand for WWW 2016.

Katherine went to Kuwait with volleyball (2014) and France with WWW 2014, and did a semester abroad in Cork, Ireland in 2016. She's headed to Dublin for her internship summer 2017.

Jonathon went to Kuwait with Academic Games (2015) and had a school trip to Berlin in 2016.

Ian has also been to Ethiopia (2006), Benin (2006), South Korea (2004), Liberia (2016), Central African Republic (2016), Cameroon (2016), Algeria (2017), Morocco (2017), Tunisia (2017), and Turkmenistan (2017). He also covers Sanaa and Tripoli (no travel there), Copenhagen and Accra. Ian aided after the Mumbai Massacre (2008), and also went to Bangalore and Hyderabad in India. A life goal for him is to serve in Russia or Canada, or really any place that has a decent hockey scene. He's happy that Frankfurt has the local Loewen team!